Parliament has published a briefing for MPs and peers on issues in financial technology, written by PhD student Sam Bayliss with the help of an IOP-funded fellowship.

Bayliss was seconded to the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) for several months through the IOP/POST Fellowship scheme. This enables postgraduate students to spend time working at POST and to write a briefing, known as a POSTnote. His was co-authored by his supervisor at POST, Dr Lydia Harriss, and covers issues including alternative finance (such as peer-to-peer lending), data analytics, new payment methods (such as by smartphone) and new ways of recording and executing transations.

The POSTnote was published in May and Bayliss has written two posts for the IOP blog about his experience of the secondment. He is now to return to his PhD studies in the optoelectronics group at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge.